Pete Hardy and I were on the piss again. Pete Hardy and I were not the type of guys you would expect to see on the piss together at all. You would never imagine we would ever be friends. Pete, you see, came from the kind of social background where his father used to mock him for being ‘a pouf’ on the grounds that he had a job in an office. In the world of Pete’s father real men had jobs as builders, demolition experts, roofers, steel smelters, mercenaries fighting in African dictatorships, or – as in the case of Pete’s father – bus drivers. I, on the other hand, came from the kind of social background where the biggest crisis one had to face was agonising over what cheese to buy in Booth’s. Nevertheless, Pete and I found ourselves going out for a drink together regularly. I am unsure quite how we got to know each other initially, but have no doubt that it would have been in a pub somewhere and that we had got into a conversation about music. Initially, I suspected that Pete only invited me for evenings out because I provided some amusement. He used to take me to extraordinarily rough pubs in Salford that epitomised the city’s stereotype to such a degree that I soon realised that if I met any of Pete’s friends who were in any actual employment at all they either a) sold drugs, b) sold guns, c) were pimps, or d) were involved in any combination of the aforementioned. Yes, so initially I believed that ...